In 2016, the Head of States and Governments of the African Union acknowledged school feeding’s contribution to human resources development in Africa, resulting in the realization of Agenda 2063, CESA 16-25 and the adoption of the Home-Grown School Feeding decision (Assembly/AU/Dec.589 (XXVI).
The Sustainable School Food and Nutrition Initiative (SSFNI) was adopted by the 31st Ordinary Session of the African Union Executive Council in July 2017 (EX.CL/1025(XXXI)) as a strategic programme towards the implementation of the Africa Regional Nutrition Strategy (2015-2025), and the fulfilment of the Malabo Declaration [Assembly/AU/Dec.490-516 (XXII)] 2014. The Malabo declaration aims to improve nutrition status and in particular, the elimination of child under-nutrition in Africa with a view to reduce stunting to 10 % and underweight to 5% by 2025.
One of the key priorities of the HGSF cluster is to produce a quality Biennial Report for Africa as stipulated in the AU [Assembly/AU/Dec.589 (XXVI)No. 17], which requests the Commission to report regularly on the implementation of the decision to the AU Assembly through the Executive Council. In 2018, the first edition of the Biennial report on School Feeding was published and it used the 2018 African Union study on Sustainable School Feeding across the African Union, with data collected from 17 Member States, as the benchmark to develop the report on school feeding.
This 2019-2020 Biennial Report aims to continue the commitment to report on the state of school feeding in Africa, provide a mechanism for accountability to the African Union, highlight best practices through case studies, and identify priorities and essential actions for school feeding in the continent.
This report builds on a methodology validated by the African Union Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (ESTI) Department in November 2020. Due to the limited time available to prepare this report, and the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, it was agreed to use existing data collected by official institutions and validated or signed-off by respective Member States’ Ministries or officials, instead of engaging in a new data collection exercise from the African Union Member States, which would have required resources used to address the COVID-19 pandemic. In keeping with the methodology agreed by the AU ESTI Department, these 2019-2020 data are compared in this report to a baseline collected in 2013 for the State of School Feeding Worldwide 2020 publication by the UN World Food Programme, due to data availability, comparability of indicators, and because individual country governments had validated and cleared their individual country data.
